L. Roger Owens

To teach preaching, I need the witness of Tom Long—and others, too.

How can we live well after 40? asks Barbara Bradley Hagerty. She could have consulted the wisdom traditions.

I had work to do the other day, but I set it aside to reread Elie Wiesel’s Night as a way to mark the great man’s death and remember his life. While I was struck by passages I anticipated, like his account of how his belief was shattered upon seeing the furnaces of Auschwitz—“Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever”—it was an unexpected line that caught me, given a current news story I’d been following.

“Seventy-one years ago, on a bright cloudless morning, death fell from the sky and the world was changed.” I hear these words on a bright, cloudless morning on my way to work. They begin the speech that President Obama gave several hours earlier at Hiroshima.

I knew Jannie Swart's witness would have a lasting impact on our seminary. I didn't anticipate how it would challenge me in the classroom.

When you read children’s literature you expect to smile at the quirky characters fumbling to figure out their growing independence. You might expect to cry as you watch characters face the pain of growing up. You don’t expect to be confronted by current events like a refugee crisis—and inspired to imagine the kind of society we could be even in the face of terror and fear.

Reading about Henry Marsh’s vocation to neurosurgery, I thought about my own calling as a minister. I was startled by his depiction of detachment from patients.

I put it off for a while. I don’t like to read people who are so popular, so trendy. Furthermore, I’m a United Methodist minister teaching at a PC(USA) seminary—why would I want to read a story of a young evangelical who has a few doubts and then joins the Episcopal Church?

South Carolina did it. It removed a “permanently” raised Confederate flag from the statehouse grounds. Now the leaders of the National Cathedral have a decision to make: Will the Jackson-Lee windows—windows extolling the Christian faith and virtue of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, and featuring images of the Confederate flag—stay or go?

Richard Rohr and Jon Sweeney, authors of two new books on St. Francis, would be united in their advice to us: forget the statue with the birds.

Even though I preached at my father’s funeral, I remembered how meaningful it was for me to sit in the front row between my brother and mother, to sing and pray with them. I wanted to do that again. The next day I changed my mind.

Amid weeks with more than their share of bad news, one story before the new year seemed like a glimmer of light in the darkness. The world grabbed onto it: Pope Francis comforting a boy as he grieved the death of his dog, telling the boy he’ll see his dog in heaven. Except the pope never said that.

For mainline pastors, the Driscoll saga—the conflict at Seattle’s Mars Hill Church leading to the resignation of superstar pastor Mark Driscoll—can seem like a number of things: an entertaining but irrelevant sideshow, a distraction from the real work of God’s kingdom, or the long-overdue fall of someone whose theological views and ideology are so different from ours. We feel so distant from Driscoll and what he stands for that we can almost watch with bemused smiles. And it’s just this sense of distance that might keep us for seeing this situation the way we should: as a cautionary tale.

Robert Benson is a guide for people who don't know how to get from a blank page to a pile of pages called a book.

When I read this passage from Luke I immediately remembered an exegesis paper I once wrote after reading an article by a doctor about what disease the woman might have. He concluded that she has a certain kind of arthritis—the same kind I had been recently diagnosed with. This gave me a sense of immediate connection with the woman in the story. Such personal identification is homiletically useful.

Richard Lischer suggests that one of the ways to organize a sermon is around a “master metaphor”—that key image on which the sermon’s progress and structure can hang. More often than not, the scripture passage itself gives us the master metaphor. If it’s difficult for listeners today to connect with the Bible’s injunctions against idolatry because our own idolatry looks so different, the metaphor of God as “fountain of living water” being forsaken for self-dug, cracked cisterns is striking.

Maybe what sociologists call mainline decline is God pulling us away from external things so we can rediscover our union with God in love.